January 2007
Jan. 10, 2007
An OpenID is not an account!
I’m excited to see that OpenID has finally started to gain serious traction outside of the Identity community. Understandably, misconceptions about OpenID continue to crop-up. The one I want to address in this entry is the idea that an OpenID can be used as a replacement for a regular user account.
[... 601 words]In fact Django reminds me a bit of the character in Airplane who always answers the "what do you make of that?" question literally... "Why, I can make a hat or a brooch or a pterodactyl..."
Nginx vs. Lighttpd for a small VPS. My VPS is still running nginx with no problems at all.
Offline Gmail and Blogger Using the Dojo Offline Toolkit. These are just mockups at the moment, but they’re a useful illustration of how offline browsing modes for Web applications could work.
AACS: Extracting and Using Keys. Another DRM system bites the dust, this time when it’s only just made it out of the gate.
Atom API for AOL Journals. AOL are doing some really cool things with the Atom Publishing Protocol.
What Python looks like naked. Michal Wallace has been doing some really interesting work writing purely functional code in Python. His latest experiment replaces all of the basic Python statements with equivalent functions.
Design Comics Templates 1.0 (via) Free OpenOffice slides with cartoons suitable for use in technical storyboards.
Jan. 11, 2007
Ubuntu sugar cookies (via) Different coloured dough is used to bake the Ubuntu logo in to the cookies themselves, kind of like making sushi rolls.
Choosing Secure Passwords. Bruce Schneier describes the state of the art in password cracking software.
OpenID Speech at Webtuesday Zurich. Good set of slides, along with the tidbit that local.ch (which had slippy maps years before Google) is implementing OpenID.
The Adobe PDF XSS Vulnerability. If you host a PDF file anywhere on your site, you’re vulnerable to an XSS attack due to a bug in Acrobat Reader versions below 8. The fix is to serve PDFs as application/octet-stream to avoid them being displayed inline.
Firefox3/Firefox Requirements (via) OpenID and CardSpace are both listed as mandatory features.
Jan. 12, 2007
MacFUSE: FUSE for Mac OS X. Mac support for user-space custom file systems, API compatible with those already written for Linux. Amit Singh runs kernelthread.com; I hadn’t realised that he had moved to Google.
Apple doesn't give a damn. Steve Jobs doesn't build platforms, except by accident. He doesn't care about your thriving metropolis. All you independent Mac developers: you're all sharecroppers, and your rent just went up. Way up.
Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing, although they are most certainly siblings. The days of lazily referring to "Mac OS X" as "OS X" are now over.
Hacking Django, how Bazaar. This is a neat trick: use Subversion to track an upstream project, then create Bazaar branches to manage your own development against the trunk.
A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope (via) Reconsidering Star Wars IV in the light of I-III. It turns out R2-D2 and Chewie were the most significant characters by quite a long way.
AJAX Debugging with Firebug. Great Firebug tutorial from creator Joe Hewitt himself. I didn’t know you could trigger profiling from your own code using console.profile() / console.profileEnd().
Correo. New open-source OS X mail client, based on Thunderbird but with a Camino-style native interface.
Jan. 13, 2007
Apache Solr 1.1. Solr is the search Web Service built on top of Lucene. The latest release introduces JSON, Python and Ruby response formats in addition to XML.
The JavaScript alert(), confirm() and prompt() functions in Firefox, Opera and MSIE (but not Safari) will truncate the message after any null character. So an unsuspecting programmer who inserts user-provided text into one of these dialog boxes opens up an opportunity for the user to rewrite the bottom of the dialog box.
Solid State Disk Changes The Game. “What if you had 2GB of RAM to compute, 32GB of SSD for fast random access, and 250GB of the slow kind. How would that change the way you design, and the kind of features you build?”
OSCON 2007 Call for Participation. The submission deadline is February 5th; the conference itself is July 23rd to 27th.
Jan. 14, 2007
Details of Google’s Latest Security Hole. For a brief while you could use Blogger Custom Domains to point a Google subdomain at your own content, letting you hijack Google cookies and steal accounts for any Google services.
Jan. 15, 2007
Designing Google Reader’s trends. “But beyond the visualization, this serves as a good example of collecting and understanding the ambient information that flows through our digital lives.”
Leaving Yahoo!, going freelance
Last Friday was my last day at Yahoo!. I’ve had a fantastic time there, and will really miss working with Tom, Paul and the many other superb Yahoos I’ve had the privilege to meet.
[... 209 words]Ubuntu Screencasts. Fantastic resource—exactly what Ubuntu (and desktop Linux in general) needs.
How to enable session saving in the new Camino 1.1a2 (via) I’ve stopped spending time in any browser that doesn’t have session saving built in—sorry Safari!
Using TextMate with Django. Including a nice looking theme inspired by the Django website.